


at night, putting your ear to the ground, you can sometimes hear a door slam

by scherzo_di_notte



Series: team gummiship [2]
Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Character Study, Gen, KH3 spoilers, boy howdy i haven't posted any writing publicly in literal years, braig gets mentioned, but kh3 sure has made me feel some kind of a way, cw: mentions of strangulation, dude's head is a scrambled egg on the inside and he has no idea, welcome to apprenticenort's personal gothic horror arg hell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-27
Updated: 2019-03-27
Packaged: 2019-12-25 06:38:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18255788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scherzo_di_notte/pseuds/scherzo_di_notte
Summary: Apprentice Xehanort, at 2:58 AM, has an encounter through a window darkly.(You really should have dug a deeper grave, old man.)





	at night, putting your ear to the ground, you can sometimes hear a door slam

**Author's Note:**

> so i have this headcanon that apprenticenort's ass is Extremely haunted by terra, who is slowly slipping further and further into going full-on heartless the worse the experiments at radiant garden get

_A memory, unbidden:_

Xehanort paced—peered from his window—night had fallen while he wasn't looking, night and a thick blanket of snow. His experiments into memory had reached a tipping point, he was murmuring into his recorder, when—he fell silent. There it was once again, clear as crystal, the glare of luminous golden eyes upon the glass.

He turned. Of course there was no one and nothing behind him. But the grotesque thing flickered in the edges of his vision still when he looked back into the glass. The creature only ever appeared to Xehanort at night. For a long while he had assumed it was merely a hallucination brought on by lack of sleep, and had been accordingly silent on the matter. Yet—

And yet it remained. This time among all the other visitations, there was something desperate in its eyes. He paused the recorder, set it upon the table. Laid a tentative hand upon the glass. Its claws were half-curled over its mouth, perhaps shielding it from something foul, perhaps covering it in shame. Perhaps—tearing at itself. At something he could not see.

Ah. Ah. There it was. A low, shapeless groan. That _voice_. If it would only say something, for once, he felt he could place that voice. So very unlike his own.

A winter's worth of cold was rising in his throat, prickling the tiny hairs on the back of his neck.

But it was silent. It only—placed one hand upon the glass, in reflection of Xehanort's own. "Do that again for me," he murmured to it. Softly, gently, that was how to address a troubled beast. It was how he addressed the Heartless belowground, and they—listened. All of them, they listened to him now, their little heads canted this way or that. "Speak for me."

The awful numbing, tingling chill was spreading to his fingertips. The creature's curled inward. At this rate he would be able to feel nothing at all of his own body, and then where would he be? Ha. Ha.—Xehanort shook his head, hard, as if to break the spell. Closed his eyes and rubbed the sleep from them—

 

_**THUMP.** _

 

Xehanort jumped—stumbled against the table—scrambled upright again, his hand stretching out to grab at—something. Something. Thin air, and there was the creature rearing back to strike once more against the glass, the sound of impact muted, as though from the room next door, where (he was sure) Braig was sleeping the sleep of the just. Nervous laughter bubbled up from his chest. That was precisely what he needed, for his night terrors to alert an overly-solicitous guard.

It—was— _only_ that, wasn't it? Night terrors. Xehanort rubbed at his eyes again, harder. There had been no actual sound, no voices, nothing, no cracks spiderwebbing from where it had hit the glass, and he knew, somehow, if something that size had really thrown itself into an attack, why, he would be—well, he didn't really care to think about how very doomed he would be, castle guard in screaming distance or no. Tried not to think of a hand that size clamping down on his throat, crushing his windpipe so he couldn't call out. Tried not to think of anything at all, clamping his hands over his ears, squeezing shut his eyes, biting down on his lip, the infernal pounding echoing in his skull like a heartbeat—

—and then, as suddenly as it started, it stopped once again. He opened first one eye and then the other. His own eyes had begun to grow luminous from the experiments, the darkness roiling in his blood, so it took him—a long, breathless moment—to realize that it was just him reflected in the darkened glass.

He wheezed, softly, the little motion stinging at his lower lip. Absently he rubbed at it: his fingers came away red. Of course. It was a bad habit of his, chewing at himself in moments like these. Only himself, no more and no less.

As well it should be.

**Author's Note:**

> terra: hey you're part me right? do you mind giving me a hand here everything really kind of sucks  
> apprenticenort: hey there you look like you'd make an interesting test subject  
> terra: **Bitch**


End file.
